IndyStar columnist Tim Swarens spent a year investigating the commercial sex trade of children, a lucrative business where more than 1 million kids a year are abused. This is the second of 10 columns in the EXPLOITED series.

BANGKOK — Outside of Lolita’s, a bar in the Nana Plaza red light district, the women check their makeup and chat as they wait on display like shoes in a shop window. Their school-girl uniform — plaid skirt, white shirt — is a lure to bring men inside, where beer runs less than four bucks and oral sex costs a bit more than $20.

Men for decades have traveled from around the globe to Nana Plaza, billed in glowing neon as “The World’s Largest Adult Playground.” And the dollars they’ve left behind have reshaped the landscape. An NBA game plays on the big screen at the American Bar & Grill, across the alley from Lolita’s. Nearby, tourists and locals pour into McDonald’s, Starbucks, Hooter’s.

No one is shy about why men come here. On Lolita’s website, management claims that it’s been ranked the “No. 1 BJ bar” in the city since 2002.

Dozens of other bars and clubs in Nana Plaza and the city’s other red light districts tout their own special services; the competition for sex tourism dollars is fierce. Lolita’s sales edge is the fantasy of youth. In reality, most of the women employed there are long past their school days. But their work uniform is a girl’s clothing.

“Lolita, noun: A precociously seductive girl." First known use: 1959.

Merriam-Webster

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: There are horrendous stories about sex trafficking. They are true. But they are not the norm. The reality is often smaller, but no less tragic.
Mykal McEldowney/IndyStar

Dolores Haze was a rape victim. She was 12. Her serial rapist, a middle-aged literature professor named Humbert Humbert, gave his step-daughter a pet name. You probably know it — Lolita.

In Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel, even Dolores’ rapist, in his rare moments of honesty, recognized the pain he caused. She “sobs in the night — every night,” Humbert admits.

Yet, within a few years of the novel’s publication, another crime was committed against the fictional character of Dolores, and worse, to millions of real-life sexual abuse victims. Uncomfortable with Dolores the rape victim, our culture turned her into Lolita the symbol of temptation, a “precociously seductive girl” luring men into her bed.

Two hours by car south of Nana Plaza, I have arrived on the wildest night of the year in the sex tourism capital of the world. The annual Songkran festival, in celebration of the Thai New Year, is near its end in Pattaya, and tens of thousands have poured into the streets for the party.

Electronica blasts from street-side speakers along the beach road. Machines pump foam into throngs of young dancers. And water — from hoses, barrels, buckets — flies everywhere. I am soaked within two blocks as I walk from my hotel to Pattaya’s infamous red light district.

The crowd on the beach road is mostly young and mostly having good fun. But the faces of dozens of older western men, many sporting large water guns to spray the young partiers, stand out in the sea of youth, like sharks circling a school of mackerel.

Pattaya got its start as a commercial sex hub during the Vietnam war when American forces were stationed at a nearby Thai air base. After the war, instead of closing up shop, business owners expanded the bars and brothels and began to market the destination to sex tourists. Pattaya’s decades-long reputation as an international “Sin City” was born.

In recent years, Thai leaders have tried to downplay sex tourism in Pattaya, Bangkok and elsewhere. The beach and other area attractions bring to Pattaya an increasing number of families and other visitors with no interest in buying sex. But scores of sex clubs and bars still operate in and near the Walking Street red light district, and thousands of “mongers,” a description some sex tourists have adopted for themselves, still flock here. The Pattaya Reports page of the International Sex Guide features more than 23,000 sex-buyer submitted entries.

The great majority of those buyers don’t travel to Pattaya or other destinations to purchase sex with children. But mixed into the masses are pedophiles and, in greater numbers, buyers who don’t care about the true age of the boys and girls they exploit.

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Bangkok’s Nana Plaza sex district is overwhelming – and part of a complicated problem.
Mykal McEldowney/IndyStar

Although Thailand long has been a top sex tourism destination, it’s actually domestic buyers who drive most of the trade. The same is true in other countries. Tourists bring in big dollars, but it’s locals who supply the market’s base with more frequent purchases.

On a bar-lined side street off Pattaya’s beach road, I encounter four teen girls who are giggling and bumping hips with two guys. The group has the look of school kids out for a night of adventure, except that the guys are pushing 40 and sport business haircuts.

As I follow them down the street, one of the men reaches to hold a girl’s hand. The second man begins to trail behind with another girl, separating her from the group.

We merge back into the masses on the beach road, and a woman presses against me. She smiles and signals that she wants to paint wet clay (another Songkran tradition) on my cheek. I shake my head no, and she moves on.

The girls and men have disappeared into the crowd. I decide to retreat from the madness.

“I’ve kind of been looked at that way all my life. Most men look at me like a sex object. It’s been like that since I was 12 or 13.”

17-year-old trafficking survivor

Like Humbert Humbert, Richard Purnell was obsessed.

In an eight-month span, between July 2015 and February 2016, federal authorities say Purnell sent 5,854 text messages and placed 204 phone calls to numbers listed in Backpage escort ads. Backpage is the most popular online site for those who buy and sell sex, and it's among those targeted for sanctions under the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act now before the U.S. Senate.

Authorities accused Purnell of directing more than 1,000 calls and texts to three young trafficking victims from the Cleveland area, including a girl who was first sold for sex when she was 13.

By the time she was 14, the child was advertised on Backpage as a “lovely college girl” with a “thing for older men.” And the 55-year-old Purnell had become such a frequent buyer that he had his own contact names on her phone — “Grandfather” and “Parma Play.” (Purnell, who owned a small roofing business, lived in the Cleveland suburb of Parma, Ohio). Once, he even picked up the girl from a foster home and drove her to his house for sex.

In November 2015, federal agents, responding to a Backpage ad, rescued the 14-year-old at a hotel. They also arrested her pimp, 22-year-old Ronnie Pratt, who was waiting in a car outside the hotel. Pratt, convicted in September 2016 of trafficking three teen-age girls, is now serving a 14-year sentence.

Police and prosecutors, faced with limited time and money, must make difficult decisions every day about which suspected criminals to file charges against. Building a case after the fact on a buyer who abused a child can be difficult and time consuming.

In Purnell’s case — he was sentenced to 17 years in prison in July — the decision to arrest and prosecute him was not driven solely by the fact that he bought sex with a child. It was the frequency with which Purnell purchased sex, the level of his obsession, that prompted federal authorities to set up the sting that finally stopped him.

Yet, dozens of other men, none of them charged, also purchased the girl Purnell exploited. They remain free while Purnell went to prison.

Which prompts a question: How many times does it take for a man to pay to rape a 14-year-old before he’s in serious legal trouble?

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A girl plays in a village in the hill country in northern Thailand. Traffickers have for years exploited young adults and children from Thailand's poor rural villages.(Photo: Tim Swarens/IndyStar)

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Purnell was the first buyer in northern Ohio and one of a few across the country to be prosecuted for paying to exploit a child. In 2015, Congress strengthened the criminal penalties that buyers can face. And Assistant U.S. Attorney Bridget Brennan, who led the case against Purnell, said more buyers are likely to be prosecuted moving forward because of the new law.

Purnell’s attorney, public defender Edward Bryan, told me his client was selectively prosecuted and isn’t the public scourge he was made out to be. “Anybody who knows (Purnell) knows he’s a pretty decent guy,” Bryan said. “He treated the women well. He was safe. If there’s a good john versus a bad john, he’s that guy.”

Prosecutor Brennan's response: “He selected himself by repeatedly purchasing sex with a child.”

Bryan, who described the fight against sex trafficking as a “cause du jour,” said his client, fooled by deceptive Backpage ads, didn’t know the girl was underage.

“When she testified, she looked like a 14-year-old,” Bryan said. “In fact, I would say she looked like she was 12. On Backpage, in a bra and panties, she looked older.”

Bryan argued that it was the girls — not his client or the pimps — who were in charge of the business. He said a second 14-year-old purchased by Purnell — a girl drawn into the sex trade at age 12 — had on her own arranged a roundtrip from Cleveland to Las Vegas, where she met sex buyers. “‘She was the most experienced prostitute I visited’,” Bryant said Purnell told him. “ ‘She would do anything’.”

The rationalizations in that defense are appalling, but it is true that trafficking victims often don’t react in ways we think they should. They may appear to be willing participants in their own exploitation. They may push the illusion they’re in control; when in fact they can’t even control who uses their bodies.

They may present to the world a hardened shell. What’s not seen, what’s buried deep inside, is the abuse and betrayal that so often break a child even before the buyers begin to arrive.

“I didn’t really care what happened to me,” a 17-year-old girl from Indiana said about the period two years earlier when she was commercially exploited. “It was at a really low point in my life.”

Today, she’s a survivor, one who wants men to stop believing dangerous fantasies about a seductive Lolita waiting behind the hotel door.

The EXPLOITED project was made possible by a grant from the Society of Professional Journalists. Google, Eli Lilly and Co., and Indiana Wesleyan University provided additional support for this project.

Contact Swarens at tim.swarens@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter @tswarens. Friend him on Facebook at Tim Swarens.